How to manage and track e-magazine software bugs

Tools for debugging e-magazine software

Most e-magazine software has always had the promise of endless possibilities when starting a new project. After several usages, the same free online magazine maker software may be weighed down by bugs, making it difficult to fully exploit it. That has the ability to kill the enthusiasm of your programmers. But, the top software developers are aware of how they can locate and fix the bugs. They have software engineering skills that they can follow to cut down on the emergence of bugs to start with.

But we can never have bug-free software. That is why the following bug-bursting toolbox will be of great help to you when doing the digital publishing.

Bug Tracker

Any given project will require some system for tracking bugs. In case a bug tracker is not included, your e-magazine software programmer may have to look at the emails and the chat logs so as to find the bugs. It is very possible in such a situation to skip some bugs without fixing them.

When the whole digital publishing project is still young, a simple text file can be used as a bug tracking system. However, the whole will eventually grow and the bugs may outgrow the text file. Many open-source and commercial bug tracking software are available. What you should consider when choosing one is that the non-programmers should be able to access it.

Print Statements

This is one of the most efficient ways of finding and fixing bugs. In case the print statements are many enough to be managed, a logging in system can be used. This is already included in many languages such as Python.

Print statements remain faster and easier for the e-magazine creator software programmer to inspect the types of variables and data values. If the print statements are well placed, it becomes possible to track the data flow in the code and the source of the bug will be detected easily.

Debugger

Most languages have included debuggers in them to inspect everything such as the virtual machine and the value of variables. The debuggers offer different features like breakpoint settings, graphical interfaces and arbitrary code execution within the execution environment.

It can be tough to employ a debugger but when you use it properly, it is an efficient and powerful tool.

Version control

Just like the bug tracking system, version control should not be ignored by any project. Several version control systems such as SVN, Mercurial and Git let different versions of code base to be split depending on what is being fixed.

It is possible to merge the various versions so that several programmers can simultaneously operate on the same code without generating bugs that can hamper the progress of others. A version control system assists the programmers to have a look at the earlier version of the code and undo mistakes which fixing them may be costly. In other terms, you are taking the code to a version in which the errors had not occurred.

Modularization

Hard-to-fix bugs in the e-magazine software emerge mostly due to a poorly-architected code. A code that can be swiftly “executed” on a paper is easier to be fixed by the programmer. One of the ways of achieving this is writing functions that play the same role.

Code modularization is the term used to refer to the situation where you design software components that will perform a single role. The software system can therefore be understood in two ways. Firstly, a level of abstraction is created in which you can think of the system module with no need of having an understanding of the details. Secondly, the module details can be understood without the unrelated code obfuscating.